These Are My Own Devices

Music: "Left To My Own Devices" by Pet Shop Boys / © Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe / Cage Music Ltd, Sony / ATV Music Publishing (UK) Ltd.

The line in the video intro - ‘Your files are exactly where you left them’ - is a literal direct quote from one of Microsoft’s Windows 10 mandatory updates. Like most of you, it scared the bejabers out of me when I switched my PC on and was informed by Windows that my files were exactly where I left them…

A riff about updates. Firmware updates, forced updates, patches, switching your phone on in the morning and discovering it’s been updated in the night and now you can’t find anything.

Music was done entirely by me in Logic Pro X. The original Pet Shop Boys track was produced by Trevor Horn, one of the all-time great producers and studio engineers, and used all sorts of amazing 80s music tech like the Fairlight CMI, the Linn Drum and the Synclavier. My version isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

Lyrics

My laptop upgrades to Windows 10
Connect to my phone, but now it’s incompatible
Read all the news about the IoT,
Turns out that 10.3 can cause connection dropping
Update my phone, my tablet and my car,
If you can’t take the pace, get out of the race,
I’m sure it wasn’t this way, back in the good old days,
I’m not stuck in the past, I’m just reverse compatible

CHORUS:

System updates: mandatory,
On my laptop, my TV, and my phone
But these are my own devices, leave them alone

Buy a new game, decide to have some fun,
The only catch is there’s a 10Gb patch
I’d like to play now, but I can’t see how,
So I poke at some code while I watch it load

I was a lonely boy, no friends, no toys
In a world of my own, with a dial-up modem
Yes, my grades were a mess, but on the BBS,
I was always online, I was a system admin

CHORUS

I was faced with a choice at a critical stage
Do we delay the release and face the shareholders’ rage?
But in the back of my head, I knew the bugs could wait,
We could deal with them later in an app update

It’s not a crime when you miss a thing or two,
A unit test, a code review
You’re still at work, it’s late at night,
Do you get it done, or get it right?
Turn off your PC, too tired to cook,
Poke at your phone, click some food
Who cares if the code is looking 5x5,
We can fix it with an update after we go live

CHORUS